


Like Fire on Water it Burns

by argle_fraster



Series: JE Author Favorites Repost [2]
Category: KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Magic, M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-01
Updated: 2010-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-30 03:51:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1013757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jin's world was turned upside down when they took him to the Capital to be part of the Blending born to rule.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Fire on Water it Burns

**Author's Note:**

> The story I chose for this was already a remix, where the author had added in Junno's mind-reading ability around the story. I loved the addition to the original, and decided that my contribution would be expanding it and building a world around it which explained Junno's mind-reading ability and allowed it to be. Haha this is sort of my explanation of how this turned into a fantasy AU setting. AU world taken from "The Blending" series by Sharon Green.
> 
> Remix of: All My Minions, Gather at the Door by rolling_scone @ LJ (work no longer available publicly)

Truth be told, Jin didn't give much thought to magic until the Adept population search started up just before his 18th birthday. He knew that the country was ruled by a Blending chosen every 25 years through a series of trials to find the Highs buried within the population, but 25 years was a long time to someone who had never been outside his own city limits and fished for a living; it was only when the next cycle started that he even thought about it at all, when his parents mentioned that the trials were coming to Chiba.

His father was a fisherman who owned a small, rickety boat that was sea-worthy about six months out of the year and in repair the other half. His mother made nets by hand after dinner and used them to catch schools along the shallows just outside their house. Both were Low Waters- on good days, his father could fill a glass with his magic, and his mother could sometimes cool bathwater with some intense concentration. Jin had never lived alone, and had never known anything but fishing. His life was filled with the salty tang of the sea and the feeling of the tide lapping up around his ankles, of rubbing rocks into the skin of the day's catch with his best friend Yamapi as they were both barefoot and tanned from the midday sun on the waves.

Pi joked the whole way to the trials that he was going to drown the Adept testing him, and Jin kept to himself that Pi didn't have enough power to do much more than create ripples on a still pond. He really didn't think much about any of it, because the trials were in the middle of their busy season, and he had to get back to work.

He was called in alone to a small room overlooking a pond just past the balcony, with a single Adept sitting in a chair near the wall. The doors were open, but the summer breeze was too hot to be cooling, even with the airflow, and Jin found the whole thing stifling when he sat down in the empty chair offered to him.

"State your name please," the Adept said. He sounded bored.

Jin had never met an Adept before. People with that much magic were few and far between, and rarely ventured outside the capital to mingle with the common folk. There were rumors that the old man who lived on the hill a few blocks past Jin's house had been an Adept at one point, but they were probably just children's stories. "Akanishi Jin," Jin said.

"And your parents have you registered as a Water," the man continued. He hadn't yet looked up from his scrolls; Jin figured he had already seen hundreds upon hundreds of candidates, and the trials had just started.

"Yes, sir," Jin replied.

The Adept pushed a small glass of water towards him, motioning towards it. "Try and manipulate the liquid in this container, if you will."

Jin didn't care about the water in the glass. He just wanted to get back to the fishing boat so his father and his younger brother weren't hauling in the lines alone. He turned to look at the pond outside instead, wishing it wasn't so hot in the room. He figured if maybe he disobeyed what the Adept told him, that he'd get sent home earlier.

So he lifted up all the water in the pond outside into a spiraling arc, and froze it solid. All of it.

It took fifteen minutes for the Adept to stop shaking and babbling. It took another five to call in every other Adept from the tests in the building. And then it took thirty minutes to get Jin's mother in via a breathless messenger, so that the Adepts could exclaim "We found a High, we found a High" over and over again, until the words all blended together and Jin couldn't tell any of them apart.

Jin's mother cried.

Jin had thought that he would welcome his 18th birthday by drinking sake with Pi and listening to his father teach him how to steer the fishing boat on his own. Instead, he packed his bag, kissed his mother goodbye, and was escorted by three Adepts to the capital, none of which had any sort of sense of humor or appreciated his fishing jokes, to stand alone in a large, cold bedchamber that he'd never seen before, where he was expected to live as they finished testing for the rest of the Highs.

It wasn't what Jin had wanted out of life. And as he lay in the bed and stared up at the ceiling, listening to an unfamiliar wind howl outside, he wished that he'd just rippled the water in the cup so the Adept would have listlessly sent him back home.

\--

The capital was pretty lonely, especially so since people acted reverently around him like he was something special- which he was. He understood, but it didn't make dealing with the awed politeness and goodwill any easier. He was removed from everything he knew, from everyone he had been close to, and more than anything else, he really just wanted a friend.

"There aren't any pastries up there," a voice said, after Jin had snuck down to the kitchens in hopes of finding a late night snack. It startled Jin so badly he nearly fell off the chair he'd been using to get to the top shelves, and he turned to find a guy around his age sitting in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest.

"How did you know I was looking for pastries?" Jin asked.

The other boy just smiled very wide. His name was Taguchi- and he insisted that Jin call him Junno instead- and he was the Spirit High.

\--

Spirit magic was something of a rarity anyway- there was only one person Jin had ever encountered that had Spirit magic, and it was at a very low level, a girl he had gone to elementary school with. People said that they were good with empathy, at assuaging anger and promoting unity.

He had not expected that the Spirit High could actually read his thoughts. But it proved useful when they were sneaking around the capital corridors, because Junno could tell what ways the guards were moving, and which of them were preoccupied with other things during their rounds. Jin thought Junno's magic was the coolest thing he'd ever encountered, and told him so.

"But you can see what people are thinking," he said, as they lay in the fields just past the outer walls and stared up at the stars. "I mean, you can tell when people are lying to you."

"It's kind of loud sometimes," Junno admitted. "It took a long time to block it out."

Jin just looked up at the moon, holding his hand up and closing one eye to look over the top of his thumbnail at the shining orb in the sky. "I still think it's awesome."

"Can you fill a bathtub without pumping the water in?" Junno asked.

"I can do way more than that," Jin replied, and just to prove it, he made it rain, just over the hill they were lying on, and they ran around in the falling droplets until they were both soaked to the bone.

\--

The second member of his Blending that Jin met was a guy named Nakamaru. He was kind of quiet and nerdy-looking, and Junno read the thoughts of the Adepts dropping him off so he could whisper to Jin that Nakamaru came from a family of merchants. He'd been attending University when they'd pulled him for the trials, and he was anxious that he wasn't going to be able to go back and finish his studies. He was the Earth High.

His first name was Yuichi, but he told Jin and Junno to call him Nakamaru, and said that he didn't like adventures. Jin took to referring to him as Maru, and made sure to take him on every excursion they had when they were supposed to be in their rooms, just to get him ready. Maru complained a lot but always went with them anyway, and Jin decided it meant that he probably liked adventures after all.

\--

Ueda showed up a month later. Jin, Junno, and Maru watched from Jin's bedroom window as the escort of Adepts brought him up through the sprawling city to the capital itself. They accosted him once he was settled in his own bedchamber and demanded to know who he was and what he could do. Apparently he found them so annoying that he knocked them all out of his room with a blast of rather cold air, and after they had finished picking themselves up off the ground, elbows clanking together and knees colliding, they came to the collective conclusion that he was obviously the Air High.

Ueda laughed at them for ten minutes, and they spent the whole rest of the night in his room, sharing stories and eating stolen sweets from the kitchens until they all had stomachaches.

\--

It was just the four of them for a long time. Jin liked the others; he found he wasn't missing the smell of the sea much anymore, wasn't longing for the break and swell of the tide against the rocks to lull him to sleep at night. The other members of his Blending were funny and laughed at his dumb jokes, and he didn't feel so out of place in the capital anymore.

It took awhile for them to find the final piece to the puzzle. By the time the last escort of Adepts made their way towards the capital with High in tow, Junno had gotten snippets of information from the members of the capital staff that were running around the premise in varying states of panic.

"His father is a noble," Junno said, as the four of them waited behind one of the pillars in the entry hall. Maru's knee was sort of knocking against Jin's ear as they all craned to see who the new arrival was. "A really important one; everyone is kind of scared of what might happen if he's displeased."

"So he's rich?" Maru asked.

"Ow," Jin hissed, when Ueda's elbow smacked into his ribs hard enough to bruise. "Is that why there are so many people with him?"

The four of them fell silent as the party made its way past their location, and Jin caught sight of the person in question- a kid maybe a year or two younger than him, with dark hair that fell in his eyes. He was all knobby limbs and too-thin appendages, and when they moved past, there was a split second where their gazes met.

"His name is Kamenashi," Junno whispered, as they watched the escort's retreating forms filing through the rest of the entry way.

And even if Jin hadn't already known that Kamenashi was obviously the Fire High, he would have been able to figure it out anyway, because the shock that had run down his back when their eyes met was still smoldering like ash at the base of his spine.

\--

Because all five of them were assembled together, the training could begin, which meant long hours of learning to control and manipulate their magic, to join together and channel all their energy through the Blending itself. The Adepts did a lot of yelling and commanding and ordering them around, until they collapsed in exhaustion at the end of the day, utterly spent.

"I can't move my legs," Junno moaned from the floor of the great hall.

"I can't even feel my legs anymore," Ueda mumbled, half-muffled from where his face was smashed against his arm.

Jin stared up at the arches of the columns, at the curve of the ceiling and the meeting of the two. "We're going to be ruling the whole country in a year," he said. "I'm sick of everyone treating us like we're kids who don't know anything."

And Kame stood up, prickly and bristling with sparks coming from the ends of his hair, glaring at Jin like he couldn't find anywhere else to put his ire. "We _are_ kids," he said, and left the room with his personal assistant Koki in tow, a few steps behind him like always.

The other three were silent for awhile after his departure, until Junno pushed himself up on his elbows.

"I think he's lonely," he said, and Jin wondered why Junno didn't just read Kame's thoughts to figure it out (he knew Junno tried not to read the thoughts of the other four out of a respect for privacy, but Junno had admitted he couldn't help it when they were broadcasting things too loud for him to block out).

"And we _do_ have a lot to learn," Maru said.

Jin just stayed where he was, looking up at the ceiling and trying to figure out what the pounding waves in his head were trying to convey.

\--

Just as he was learning to use his own magic, he was learning to use the magic in time with the others. A Blending was formed to rule; all five parts had to be present. The Adepts kept saying it was because five was a stable number- any fewer, and the bonds would break, but with the five of them linked, it was secure and lasting. Jin just thought that it was because each of them brought something into the fold.

When they were linked, he could feel the others there, like a hum in his veins. He could feel them in the web and sense bits of the emotions they sent through the connection. The Adepts worked them over and over, hitting them with anything they could- a recreation of a tsunami bearing down on a coastal fishing village they had to stop, an invading army marching on their doorstep they needed to squash.

When they put them in the middle of dry kindle and set the whole thing on fire, Jin could feel the others' emotions pulsing through the web uniting them. They were all working on quelling the flames- five parts working individually and yet together, tangled up in one another whether they liked it or not. And it's then he sensed when Kame's exhaustion hit, when he couldn't push the flames down any longer, when he lost the tenuous control he had over the fire raging in front of him. Jin felt it slip and his mind flared up with panic and fear, and he moved.

He was the closest to Kame. He threw his arms around the other boy's middle and he pushed with everything he had at the fire leaping at them, pushed wave after wave of cold water until there was nothing but embers flickering on the ground and sweat on his forehead.

"That was good," the Adepts said, making notes in their scrolls and nodding their heads.

Jin didn't pay attention to that. He just tried to stop shaking, to stop thinking about what might have happened, and to look at anything but Kame's wide, dark-lashed eyes and hunched shoulders.

\--

It started after that- every time Kame looked at him, he had a weird expression on his face, almost like he was going to be sick at any moment. It went on for days without explanation, until they were in the dining room just off the great hall, under the watchful gaze of the ever-present Adepts (to make sure nothing happened before the Blending could take power).

Jin wanted to say something, but before he could, Kame left, wide-eyed and slightly green in the face. He didn't finish his dinner. Jin picked at the rest of his own plate and ducked out early to head back to his room and try to sort his thoughts out, but not before Junno found him in the hallway and slung his arm across Jin's neck.

"It was probably the chicken," Junno suggested.

Jin refrained from pointing out that he hadn't asked for Junno's input at all. And then he worried how loud he'd been broadcasting if Junno had picked it out anyway.

"Sort of loudly," Junno said, and he looked sheepish. "I'm sorry. I try, but you just-"

His voice trailed off, and he shrugged his shoulders helplessly, arm falling free from its coil around Jin. "Your thoughts are very loud, sometimes."

"I think he's mad at me," Jin said. "I think- oh god, I think he hates me. How can we rule if he hates me? He's probably so mad that I pushed myself in and thought I had to help him."

"I don't think saving someone counts as humiliating them," Junno pointed out.

But Kame was hot edges and flaring temper, quick to burn and slow to smolder into nothing, and Jin spent the whole night worrying about it, replaying the situation over and over in his head until the sun broke over the horizon.

\--

The next day's training was a disaster. They all get yelled at by the Adepts, who claimed they'd never be able to rule if they couldn't work things out within the group. Maru didn't say anything before he stomped out of the great hall, and Ueda gave Jin a half-shrug before following, and Junno just clamped a hand down on Jin's shoulder, squeezing the joint a little. Jin knew it was his fault- he changed the dynamics. He'd hurt the whole Blending by making Kame mad.

He knew he was going to have to say something, to apologize, and Kame found him first, just outside the great hall. The sky was streaked with deep reds and purples as the night trickled in and the corridor was dark and empty. Jin tried to think of something to say- he was afraid to push, because Kame was all flames and sparks, volatile and unpredictable.

Then Kame looked at him with that weird face again, half-scrunched eyebrows and frustration, his eyes a little glassy. He made an impatient sounding noise deep in his throat and the next moment he grabbed Jin by the collar. He pulled Jin close and pressed their lips together. It was too hard, too nervous, and their teeth clanked together awkwardly.

 _Kame kissed him,_ and Jin's mind went hopelessly blank.

Jin stumbled into Junno's bedchambers later and slumped down with his back against the heavy wooden door. When he pursed his lips together, he swore his lips were still tingling with residual heat.

"Wow," Junno said, palms pressed against Jin's cheeks as he stared at his face, "your head is _empty._ "

\--

Jin didn't want to ask, but he was so desperate for an explanation that he did anyway.

"I'm telling you," Junno said, "all I heard was _consequences be damned._ And I'm not going to go poking around in Kame's head just so you can figure out what he wants from you."

It didn't help at all, and Jin just sulked with his arms crossed over his chest. He didn't even notice the slip of control until the first few drops of water fell from the ceiling beam over their heads and hit the bare skin of his arm.

"Could you maybe not... do that?" Junno asked. He was soaking wet, and didn't look very pleased about it. "Do you want some pastries?"

But all Jin wanted was more awkward teeth-clanking and Kame's mouth smudged against his own. "I hate you."

\--

After three days of completely ruined practices, the Adepts gave them a break. Jin used the time off to go back home and see how the fishing business was doing. His father had fixed up the boat again, and his mother made him cuts of sashimi wrapped in seaweed, and Jin sat on one of the old, battered docks and let the bottom of his feet drag against the top of the water. He stared out at the sunlight reflecting off the gently lapping waves and watched the fishing boats slowly drift by.

By the time he returned to the capital, he'd sorted his thoughts out. The problem was that he sort of liked Kame. He sort of liked Kame a lot, except that Kame didn't know, and neither had Jin, until he'd really thought about it and put everything together. It was annoying how Kame was a perfectionist, how he demanded the best from himself and the other Blending members. It was annoying how Kame prickled when he thought he was being made fun of, how he internalized everything like every situation was just feeding the internal fire. It was annoying how much Jin liked it, how much he liked Kame.

He didn't know why Kame kissed him, and if maybe Kame kissed him because he had felt like he owed Jin something for protecting him. If Kame did it to square the debt, then Jin doubted he would be up for kissing him again.

The first night they were all back in the capital, they ate dinner together. Kame looked at anything but Jin, and Jin thought about the situation again as he poked at his meat. If Kame didn't mind, then maybe he would kiss Jin again and make that tiny noise in the back of his throat and rub their noses together. His mouth would open, would be hot and slow and soft, and then Jin would pull down Kame's collar and nibble his collarbone and run his fingers over the lines of Kame's hip, and-

Junno's silverware hit his plate all at once with a loud crash, and Jin looked up, surprised by the noise. They stared at each other for a few moments, and then Junno looked away, visibly gulping. He continued to glance at Jin (and Kame) with wide eyes for the rest of the meal.

Kame didn't look at Jin at all.

\--

After the practices, the Blending started to attend lessons on politics, on economics, on anything the Adepts thought they needed in order to successfully rule. The days were long and often boring, and Jin actually nodded off during a particularly dull lecture about how an equation about rice paddies factored into the prosperity of the national treasury.

When Jin groggily woke up, his head was pillowed against Kame's shoulder, and Kame was looking at him, soft light from the candles flickering over his face.

"You're staring at me," Jin mumbled out loud, before he could stop himself.

Kame flushed and turned away. Jin watched him for a moment, noted the way Kame's skin puckered when he bit down on his bottom lip, and then closed his eyes again. Kame could look all he wanted. And Jin didn't really care about the national treasury.

\--

They were the youngest Blending to ever appear. Jin knew that people within the capital were worried as the time of their control got closer, because he could hear them discussing it when he walked through the hallways and no one knew he was there. There were whispers everywhere, in every corner of the building, and they echoed in Jin's head even when he was alone in his bed and trying to sleep.

"Everyone is worried," Junno told the other four after practice. "It's just that they can't choose the Highs, only find them. And we're all so young."

"Do they think we can't do it?" Ueda asked, and Junno didn't answer, just looked down and away, and Jin knew what the response would have been. He'd never felt so strongly about proving everyone wrong. Maybe he'd grown up as a fisherman learning how to slowly bind nets together by lamplight, but that didn't make him simple.

Maru shifted, drawing his knees towards his chest and sweeping his hands over the floor as tiny stalks blossomed under the motion of his palms, curling up from the mortar between the tiles. "Well," he said, "then we show them we can do this. We prove we can do this."

Kame said nothing. Jin said nothing, either. He looked at Kame and thought about the younger man's mouth pressed against his own. He remembered the way it had been hot and sparking. He wondered if it would taste a bit like spicy blackened remnants on the outside of food when he swept his tongue inside Kame's lips.

Junno stopped Jin outside the great hall, after the impromptu meeting broke up.

"Maybe you should tell him," Junno said. He looked kind of pale, and Jin thought maybe he was right. He had to be broadcasting awfully loud all the time, but he couldn't seem to exercise much control over it.

\--

Just as Jin steeled himself to find the courage to tell Kame what he'd been wrestling with, the other man beat him to it.

It was cool outside, and Jin had his window open while he slept, though he'd been dozing badly off and on, his thoughts consumed with everything else. He woke up when there were footsteps against his bedroom floor, soft pads of soles against the tiles there. He stretched out blindly for a moment with his senses, but it wasn't an assassin; he could feel the pulse of another of his web members there instead, steady and almost comforting.

Kame stood at the foot of Jin's bed, hand resting lightly on the post. "So, um," he started, as Jin sat up and ran a hand blearily through his bed-tousled hair. Kame might have been talking to the silence, or maybe to Jin; Jin wasn't sure, because the only thing Kame wasn't looking at was him, and Jin still wanted to kiss him anyway. "I don't know why," the other man continued, "but I kind of like you."

It took him a couple of tries, and then it took a moment for Jin to make sense of the rushed words. But it was suddenly all so obvious- of course Kame wouldn't have kissed Jin if he hadn't meant it, not even if he thought he needed to settle the debt between them.

Jin felt oddly light-headed and kind of silly, which was the only reason that the next words out of his mouth were, "Duh. I like you, too," and not something much smoother. After realizing what he said, he tried to find something better to follow it up with, only Kame climbed on the bed and kissed him again.

There were sparks between their mouths. Sparks and then a rush of cool over the stinging skin as Kame moved, mouth opening a little. He'd probably just meant to gasp at the sensation, but Jin wasn't going to let the opportunity go to waste- he parted Kame's lips to curl his tongue inside, sweeping along the back of Kame's teeth. Then Kame moaned, just the way Jin had thought he would, all low and feral in the back of his throat.

Jin pulled him forward, and Kame's knees ended up on either side of Jin's thighs, straddling him. There were blankets between their forms but they were completely insubstantial; Jin could _feel_ Kame's every movement beneath his hands, flames that worked their way through his bloodstream. Kame was molten under his touch, shifting and leaping like a blaze towards the sky. Every time Kame ran his hands over a bare patch of skin, a trail of warmth flickered behind his touch and lingered on Jin's nerves.

Jin didn't even know what to do other than kiss him back as hard as he could, needy and desperate and seeking more, crashing against the other man like a wave upon the shore. When Kame's mouth broke away from his to move to the skin of his neck, Jin arched up beneath him, fingers splaying across the expanse of Kame's back.

"You taste like fire," he whispered.

Kame moved against him, and it sent flares of heat through every one of Jin's senses. "You taste like the sea," Kame replied.

He kissed Jin again, unrelenting, and when Jin broke away to catch his breath, the air from his exhale was steam that curled up towards the ceiling, water evaporated by the heat enveloping it.

\--

In the middle of the night, Jin woke up covered in sweat, sweltering from the heat of Kame wrapped around him. The other boy's hair was in his mouth and Jin turned to kiss him again, waking Kame up, kissing him over and over again until his body was on fire once more, and all he wanted to do was drag his fingertips over every single inch of Kame's smoldering skin.

\--

Tension resolved, the Blending got through practices with relative ease and the Adepts were satisfied. Jin tried to keep his thoughts from being so loud as best he could, but sometimes he'd look over at Kame after a round of testing when he was exhausted and drained, and he would feel Kame's presence in the web like a pang of copper flames that arced up through his throat. And then Junno would get embarrassed and stutter a lot, and once he ran into the door trying to get out of the room in a rush.

Jin felt a little bad, but it was preferable to what the anxiety had been like before. The lessons wound down and the practices eased, and people started to treat them with a little more delicacy- they would take over ruling soon. The Blending in power was to step down at the end of their 25 years, at the end of December.

"It's going to be hard once we take power," Maru warned, as the five stood on Kame's bedroom balcony to watch the sunset. "It's not going to be easy like this anymore."

"Sure it won't," Jin said, "but we won't be alone."

Ueda laughed. "Isn't that the whole point?"

"We need to do something good," Maru continued. "I think we should work on changing the country's currency system. It just doesn't properly reflect how the common people use it and trade it, it needs to be updated and evolved and-"

"Maru, shut up," Jin laughed. He draped his arm over Kame's shoulder, tugging the other man in towards him.

When Jin met Junno's gaze, there was something like understanding shimmering there. "As long as we don't set Maru loose on the country, I think it'll be alright."

"Yeah, you guys are assholes," Maru grumbled from the opposite side of the balcony. "You wait until you wake up one morning and find your beds have been covered in poison ivy."

Kame's fingers pulled at Jin's shirt when his hand snaked around Jin's waist. He fit underneath Jin's arm snugly, radiating heat. "Do it, and your hair ends up burned clean off your head."

They stood in companionable silence as the bright orange of the sun started to slip beneath the dark horizon. Kame's hand worked its way under the fabric, to graze across Jin's hips and leave hot sparks in its wake.

"Jin," Junno murmured, "you're broadcasting again."

"Sorry," Jin just laughed, and pressed a kiss to Kame's temple through tendrils of hair.


End file.
